The following is an excerpt from the Microsoft MSDN Library, April 2000:

“MS Shell Dlg is a mapping mechanism that enables U.S. English Windows NT/Windows 2000 to support locales that have characters that are not contained in code page 1252. It is not a font but a face name for a nonexistent font. It can be specified in either the Windows NT/Windows 2000 Setup file during the installation process or when customizing a local system by double-clicking Control Panel's Regional Options icon. When you double-click the icon, click the Set default ... button in the General sheet of the Regional Options dialog box. Select the appropriate locale in the Select System Locale dialog box and click OK, then restart the system. The appropriate change occurs in the following registry key:

A benefit of font mapping in the registry is that you can change the font for the entire shell by simply changing one .inf file entry. For example, localization for Asia is much easier because you can change the .inf file entry, instead of changing every instance of MS Sans Serif in every .rc and .dlg file, and the change is complete without rebuilding any binaries. Win32-based applications that contain multiple language resources that cross character-set boundaries can also take advantage of this feature. It is also useful when you have an English application in which supporting multiple languages and character sets is important.

So in this case, the workaround is to find and change an ".inf file entry?"

Thanks. If the font isn't found -- for whatever reason, in whatever kind of object -- could I do a workaround by installing the missing font?

The optimal solution is to have the creator of the imported object either embed the font, or convert the text to outlines, and then re-save. Not all file formats support embedding, of course. EPS and PDF do.

Plan B is to install the missing font on your local machine.

Plan C, if the substitution is not causing a visible problem, is to either ignore it, or adjust your Frame font-mapping and Remember Missing Fonts options (which may or may not be helpful with some types of imported objects).

MS Shell Dlg 2 isn't really a font at all ...

What kind of objects are being imported that invoke this? (file format and content)

If I had to guess, I'd suspect they were hand-crafted recreations of localized dialog boxes, using real MS screen fonts. If so, chances are that "substitute Times New Roman for" is not ideal. You might set the Frame font map to substitute Arial.

RE: If I had to guess, I'd suspect they were hand-crafted recreations of localized dialog boxes, using real MS screen fonts.

Sorry? ( "Que?" the waiter Manuel used to say, furrowing his eyebrows, in the old TV classic, "Fawlty Towers.") I'm not writing software documentation. There are no screen shot graphics. This is all text I've written, with graphic frames (jpegs, mostly, from DWG's, DWF's, and STP files, with some photographs) showing industrial packaging machinery.

...But I guess it's possible I was doing some online research, looking up a supplier's recommended guidelines, or whatever, and

cut and pasted a few words of text directly in to my doc. Without going through NotePad!

An excellent freebie utility for future viewing (viewing, not editing) MIF files is MIFBrowse by Graham Wideman. Even though it hasn't been updated in umptyump years, it works with any version of MIF. It's here:

Is there a FM option for that character-- Ctrl Q + something, or esc + something?

[Ctrl[q]]1

I would typically create a variable for it:

Name: char.symbol.plusminus

Definition: \xb1

or, on the odd chance that your narrative font doesn't have the glyph, or you want the typeface style to match other symbols, plusminus also exists in the TT and T1 "Symbol" fonts. Assuming you have a Character Format named "Symbol", the var would be:

Name: char.symbol.plusminus

Definition: <Symbol>\xb1<Default ¶ Font>

For future reference, see:

drive:\Program Files\Adobe\FrameMaker#.#\OnlineManuals

file: Character_Sets.pdf

That was at 7.0.

I don't have a 9.0 install handy to check at the moment.

_______

And yes, you can fake plusminus as "+" with an underscore, except in this forum

According to the Character_Sets.pdf there, the keyboard sequence Ctrl+q 1 was dropped at FM8. It's unclear if hex code \xb1 went with it.

I also looked and found that there are separate character sets for different versions of FM. (Or maybe the character sets are the same, ...)

Special character keystroke sequences were historically very different for Unix, Mac and Windows. In the past, the available characters might even have been different as well. Using hex codes in variables for these tended to minimize platform portability problems.

However, with FM8, Unicode took over. I haven't really looked into whether or not it would be wiser to use Unicode code points once we migrate off FM7.1. Obviously, these would not backport to FM7.x or earlier, should that be an issue.

I got the MS Shell Dlg 2" Font is not available. "Times New Roman" will be used in this session." error recently, running Adobe FM 10 on Windows 7. I tried all kinds of solutions even trying to edit the Windows registry for the MS Shell Dlg 2 font which did not correct the problem. As mentioned in this thread, MS Shell Dlg 2 is not really a font, and so I couldn't search for it in the files. FM would not build the book with this error in 2 of my chapter files. Finally my colleague suggested I deslect Remember missing font names in the FM Preferences with no files open, open each file, let FM substitute MS Shell Dlg 2 to use Times Roman, then save the files. On reopening, I no longer got the "

The "MS Shell Dlg 2" Font is not available. "Times New Roman" will be used in this session." error.

Yes, if you copy and paste some characters from Windows’ Character Map utility you are likely to introduce as a side effect that ominous font. I seem to remember it helps to paste using Edit > Paste Special > Unicode Text.

a lot of great information here and yes, I'm seeing similar results to what others report. It is suggested to tell FM to stop looking for missing fonts but that causes FM to lose the original font information in the document. That might be ok, but folks should be aware of what is happening to their doc.

the MS Shell Dlg and MS Shell Dlg 2 are face names used for mapping. Depending on what Windows version you're using the referenced font is different.

To see what is installed on your machine get to a run prompt (window button + r) then type "control fonts" without the quotes. That will show you what is installed on your machine.

To see what is being mapped to MS Shell Dlg and Dlg 2 get to a run prompt and type regedit (registry editor BE CAREFUL HERE) go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\FontSubstitutes and review what font is being referenced

I'm on Windows 7 so MS Shell Dlg is MicroSoft San Seriff and MS Shell Dlg 2 is Tahoma